It was another busy week and very fulfilling. Monday was coffee with Dmitry. Tuesday after school, I went with Sonia to the visa center. She is traveling across Russia on the Transsiberian Railroad this summer and needs a visa to get through Mongolia. Holy crow! They’re making her jump through hoops. She had to so all her reserved tickets and hotel rooms. Then she had to pay a bucketload of money. Now they’re telling her she has to go to the Mongolian Embassy in Moscow to pick it up. They won’t mail it. But here’s the catch 22. They have to send the passport in with her application papers. But she can to travel on trains or planes in Russia without showing a passport. So how’s she supposed to get to Moscow to pick up her passport with the visa, without having a passport to travel with? This is truly a sticky wicket!
Wednesday was table tennis. This time it was Paul, Ravil and me. Same old, same old. They kill me every time, but it’s good practice and good exercise.
Thursday was couch surfing. I met a couple new people, one of whom is very interested in anime. I stayed for about two hours because Friday the bosses had organized a trip to Yelebuga.
Yelebuga is a small city with a population of about 74,000 in the east of Tatarstan. I would label it a company town, like the old coal mining regions had in the States years ago. The companies owned the houses, the stores and the mines. In the case of Yelebuga, it’s a group of high tech companies (some of them foreign) and they have created a campus with a school, a kindergarten and lots of very modern homes for school staff and employees of the companies who send their kids to the school. The campus also has a camping area, bike and walking paths, grill huts and a traditional Russian bathhouse.
The school is a multilingual school which concentrates on science, technology, engineering and math. Much of the subject matter is taught in English. Our delegation (8 of us) was sent to see what ideas we might be able to transfer from Yelebuga school to ours. We spent the entire morning touring the school and then had a nice lunch there. Because it is Ramadan now, some of our staff members couldn’t eat so they had a walk around the campus. Then we took a quick bus ride around campus before we rode into town and picked up a tour guide who gave us a tour of the city and the home of the great Russian landscape painter Ivan Shiskin. For a small city, it has a big history. And it was so beautifully green. Every time I’ve driven in this direction before, it’s been in cold weather when the snow has been up to my eyebrows. It was really refreshing to see it in green!
Our overall impression was that the school doesn’t do enough to educate a well-rounded child because it concentrates so much on the sciences and tech. But it’s undedstandable that they do so because this is a “company town” which is educating for the express purpose of leading this kids into these companies. When I asked a question about the liberal arts portion, or lack thereof, they said they teach emotional education and social skills. Ok. I guess my point would be, if you teach a kid about art, music, languages and different cultures along with science and tech, you probably would need emotional education.
The older classes spoke English well. The kindergarten kids answered in Russian when while the teachers spoke in English. Not one of them asked the kids to try to say it in English. It certainly is an interesting concept and serves the purpose for which it is intended. I’m just not sure if it’s the right education for every child. Even in the States we wait at least until the end of elementary school before a kids decides whether he wants to go to a School of the Arts, or a STEM school or just a regular high school. I’d love to see this school again in five years and look at the success rate. They at least had a 10-year plan and didn’t seem to do things as piecemeal as our school.
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